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In the case of a photo, it doesn't give a thumbnail preview when opening a folder, and when clicking to open, gives me the message: "Windows photo viewer cannot open this picture because the file appears to be damaged, corrupted, or is too large". If it's a PDF, or a doc, it says it is an "unsupported file type" or the file has been damaged. If it's a .DOC or .XLS it will try to open some document converter in those programs and then can't open it. It's not a drive issue (hardware) because it started happening on both the c drive and the external drives at the same time.

Again, this is occurring on multiple drives and it all started at once, so I don't think it's problems with any particular drive. Some directories are fine and do not exhibit the problem. (for instance, on the external drive, some folders containing images are fine, while others are not, even though the images in the ok directories may be larger than the ones where there are problems). Also, it doesn't seem to be isolated to certain directories - for instance..... on the C drive (Desktop, specifically), I can open a folder containing photos.... and only 1 of the 15 has the problem. The other 14 display their thumbnail fine, and open fine, but the 1 is having the problem seen in the attached screenshots - no thumb preview, and unable to open. Also, some Word Doc's on the desktop open fine, while others are showing the craziness displayed in photo attachment #1 (Problem1-WordDoc.jpg).

So....I have a few questions....
1) - The malware experts say the problem appears to be "damaged files". Well, how were they damaged? I didn't do anything out of the ordinary. This is a business computer.... I stay away from risqué sites.

2) - Why did this begin happening on different drives at the same time?

3) - why are some files affected but others are not, even in the same directory?

The most prevalent reasons that files suddenly or becomes corrupted are due to unstable and bad sector(s) on your hard drive(s). Fragmentation, disk activity such as read/write, old age, thermal events and unproper shutdown (PC) and removal of drives are some of the known hardware related causes of data corruption. As suggested by David, try using a different computer in order to check the difference. Use also the Windows Error Checking Tool to correct system and unstable sectors, hopefully this would clear your problem. The Windows utility could also be used for your external storage drives. To be clear also, a double backup of important data on different storage is essential.

The only thing I can think of, assuming all of the software approaches check clean, as they appear to, is an intermittent hardware problem, or possibly a weak or failing power supply. Check all cables and memory modules for proper seating. You can check the power supply voltages in the BIOS setup program. None of this will fix the busted files, but at least it won't happen again.

As for recovering damaged files, once they're damaged it's difficult to correct them. What it means is that some clusters have been corrupted and, unless you have good backups, there's no way to reconstruct them. Word and Excel files can be looked at with a good, plain text editor like SuperEdi or Wordpad, so you can at least see what's damaged. Images are already seemingly random gobbledegook, so they're impossible to figure out. Most of these files will appear to be random characters. If you see sudden blocks of differing, unrelated content, such as parts of text files, it means something has partially overwritten them, pointing back to a possible hardware problem..